6. The Beatles (The Beatles, 1968)

What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

Chapter XLII – “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Moby Dick, Herman Melville

*****

The very first thing I learned about the White Album … was that it “stank.”

And who was the man responsible for shaping this highly formative and yet rather spurious view of the bleached work in question?

My father.

One evening, shortly before I reached eleven years of age, just after I’d heard several Beatles songs on the radio and asked my father if he knew anything about them, he rifled through the generally neglected family record collection, pulled out four long-hibernating and previously unplayed (by either of my parents, in my lifetime at least) Beatles albums, and placed them on the living room floor. Oh, merely Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the White Album.

Those first three, I’ll get to another day, but when I picked up the White Album and asked him about it, he said, “Yeah, that one’s not very good.”

I noticed the fourth track, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

“Hey, isn’t that the theme tune from Life Goes On?”

“Yeah, that song’s good.” He took a brief, uninvested glance at the track listing. “‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ is good. ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is good.”

“Those are all on side one,” I observed alertly.

“Yeah, side one is good. The rest is pretty crummy though.”

“So I should just listen to side one?”

“Yeah, that’s my suggestion. I wouldn’t really bother with the rest.”

And at that age, when my father’s opinions held more weight to me than any school teacher’s, religious leader’s, or sports celebrity’s, I took his word for it.

That’s right. I, a hungry, curious, instantly-obsessive Beatles convert, had four sides of the White Album at my listening disposal, to potentially be placed on a turntable at any time, and I only listened to side one. I mean, why would my father be wrong about something like that?

Well, nothing like a silly local radio promotional stunt to undercut paternal authority, for approximately eight months later, on Thanksgiving weekend in 1991, came the most epochal event in the history of American mass media. I am speaking of KFRC’s “Beatles A to Z Weekend.”

This was the motherlode of all motherlodes. Until that point, my only other Beatles product aside from the four records mentioned above was a commercial cassette of the Beatles’ 20 Greatest Hits (something of a precursor to Beatles 1). Suddenly, a radio station was playing every Beatles song? In alphabetical order?

A pile of blank 90-minute cassettes at the ready, I hunkered down for the weekend, the index of Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions spread out before me, hardly leaving my bed until I’d taped the entire catalogue. Having only started recording at “Here, There, and Everywhere,” I found myself needing to circle my way back around, by cassette #7, to “Here Comes the Sun,” but by God, I made it.

And the “Beatles A to Z Weekend” is indeed how I came to be familiar with about 62% of the Beatles’ catalog: in alphabetical order. To this day, I still hear George’s vaudevillian “Baby bah blues” that wraps up “For You Blue” immediately followed by the “Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dum-dum-dah” of “From Me To You,” the eerie cacophony of “Only a Northern Song” exploding into the arresting acapella of “Paperback Writer,” the final fuzz bass notes of “Think for Yourself” followed by the bright acoustic strum that opens “This Boy,” etc. Constantly listening to my tapes of the “Beatles A to Z Weekend” is how I used to blow my friends’ minds by stating that I could name every Beatles song in alphabetical order. It wasn’t because I was, like, weird or something.

But as the “Beatles A to Z Weekend” continued to work its scrambled magic that November, a funny thing happened. I kept hearing various tracks from the White Album – entirely out of sequence, of course – but, to my surprise, I discovered that I … kind of liked them?

You know, the songs that my father said were terrible?

Did I have … bad taste in music? Was I a shameless Beatles apologist? Was I obligated to keep this heresy to myself?

One day, feeling bold, I mentioned to my father that I actually sort of, uh, enjoyed most of the songs on the White Album. After emitting a disgusted grunt of disbelief, he collected himself, then muttered, “You only like those songs because they’re the Beatles, and everyone else pretends to like them too, because they want to buy the myth that everything the Beatles did was great, and they don’t want to admit that anything the Beatles did was crap.”

I didn’t understand. Was he accusing me of … not liking something I truly liked? As if I were pretending to like it?

And so, I began to wonder: if my father was wrong about the White Album, then what else was he wrong about? Who was this man?

Two years after the “Beatles A to Z Weekend” had come and gone, leaving behind seven religiously consumed, low-quality cassettes in its wake, it dawned on me that, while hearing every song from an album in random order can be useful, it is not quite the same thing as sitting down and listening to the album proper.

So one day, I devised a plan: I would approach that strange device with the needle and the twirling apparatus on it and give each side of the White Album its own “week.” In other words, during one particular week, I would come home from school and immediately play side one of the White Album every day, and then give the same treatment to sides two, three, and four, until the month was over. I don’t know if many listeners in the CD age (streaming age?) have come to understand the unique feel of each “side” of this pale-faced behemoth; in my mind, heavy silence after “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and “Long, Long, Long” (both of which end with an oddly dangling Ringo rimshot) is almost mandatory.

This same vinyl copy still sits on my shelf, naturally sporting the requisite White Album ringwear and serial number: A2158481 (not a particularly low number, but I’ll bet it’s at least higher than someone else’s). I’m not sure if those who’ve merely owned reissues in other formats are aware that the only text on the original cover aside from the serial number was not “The BEATLES” spelled in grey font, but simply an embossed “The BEATLES” that sported the exact same hue as the rest of the cover, only visible due to years of accumulated dirt and grime. This album was white, people.

Well, four weeks on in my little plan, I may not have evolved from a boy to a full-grown man, but I was surer than ever of one thing, and one thing only:

My father’s opinion of the White Album was not my opinion of the White Album.

Sometime in my college years, I’d venture to guess, after having expanded my knowledge of 20^th century popular music far beyond my eleven-year-old self’s strict oldies radio adherence, I once again heard my father badmouth the White Album in my presence. Armed with a lethal stockpile of rock snob terminology, I responded, “But you’ve got to understand, it had such a massive influence on punk and post-punk and ‘80s and ‘90s alternative rock,” to which my father snappily responded, “Yeah, and all that music sucked.”

So much for that strategy.

I think as a result of the family patriarch’s strongly-expressed views, I’ve always felt the instinctive need to “defend” the monochromatic work in question – even after learning that many very intelligent music fans would not only declare the White Album to be arguably the best Beatles album, but quite possibly the proverbial “best album ever made.” I mean, do I really need to explain why I love the White Album? Does the album need “championing” at this point? What would be the purpose? Merely acting out some grotesque Freudian psychodrama?

I’ve often wondered what exactly it was about the album that stuck in my father’s craw. My best guess, as of October 2023: while he generally appreciated humor in music, I don’t think he appreciated absurdity. I suspect that the Beatles’ frequent avoidance of the naked sincerity that had generally been present in their prior material was, in his mind, tantamount to the Beatles “not trying.” Perhaps he interpreted the Beatles releasing an album chock full of weird, experimental, sardonic, offbeat, uncommercial tracks as the Beatles “taking advantage” of their devoted fanbase, as if they were cheating hardworking people out of their money. He simply couldn’t fathom that millions of listeners the world over could enjoy music that mainly seemed to exist in order to take the piss out of other peoples’ music. Not that that’s what the White Album is, of course.

Because the White Album is a lot of things.

*****

I wish I had some fancy, unexpected “take” on the White Album, but really I don’t. Why try to reinvent Coca-Cola when the classic flavor tastes just fine? I love it for all the same reasons everybody else loves it. Saying it “would have been better as a single album” is like saying a double-decker bus would have been better as a regular-sized bus. You know why it isn’t a single album? Because the Beatles didn’t intend it to be a single album. I mean, it’s the internet age, you can take the track listing and do whatever the hell you want with it. You think Abbey Road would have been better as half an album? Fine, go and make it half an album. Knock yourself out.

Why I love the White Album, in one sentence: It is unequivocally, irrevocably, unabashedly not Sgt. Pepper, Part II.

And people would have eaten up a Sgt. Pepper, Part II! If the Beatles had made a Sgt. Pepper, Part II, would anyone have complained? I think the contrast in album covers must have handily shifted purchasers’ expectations before they’d heard a note of the new work. “Man, that Sgt. Pepper album cover, what a gas! How the hell are they going to … Oh.” Of course, the Beatles couldn’t have made Sgt. Pepper, Part II even if they’d wanted to, because 18 months had gone by since they’d made it, and in “Beatle years,” 18 months was like the equivalent of two decades in normal human years. Why not ask a Category 5 hurricane to move back to where it was two days prior? Why not ask a glacier to re-freeze?

Now, I love easy, clichéd cultural narratives as much as the next blogger, so let’s go with it. Western society was kind of falling apart in 1968. The Beatles themselves were kind of falling apart in 1968. This album kind of sounds like a band falling apart. Therefore, this album kind of sounds … like 1968?

It’s the sound of Richard Nixon mudwrestling with James Earl Ray while Sirhan Sirhan watches from the cheap seats. It’s the sound of Marxist students in Paris dropping fiery chunks of napalm onto Democratic National Convention protestors while Vietcong soldiers march into Czechoslovakia. Have I left anything out?

My guess is that, for about 90% of the global population, there was essentially zero difference between 1967 and 1968, but narratives are fun. Whatever the “hippie dream” was, I suppose it was starting to die in 1968. Or hold on, maybe it died at Altamont in December 1969. Or Kent State in April 1970. Or when the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was cancelled in April 1969. I’ve never quite figured it out.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, while the Beatles were clearly plugged in to the cultural turmoil of the moment and they didn’t intend to avoid commenting on the volatility of the era, I doubt they consciously sat around, discussed the political climate, and deliberately decided, “We want this album to sound like the era we’ve made it in.” I think they were just slowly falling apart and couldn’t have made any other possible album.

But that’s OK! Perhaps I come off like the apologetic fanboy my father accused me of being, but I admire that the Beatles were true to the spirit of what was present at that jumbled juncture in their musical journey, instead of trying to paper over their turbulence. “Our manager’s dead, John’s obsessed with some Japanese conceptual artist girlfriend, and we’re spiraling into chaos? Fine, we’ll make an album that sounds like it’s spiraling into chaos.” You know what? Life is chaotic.

In that sense, the White Album, like Sgt. Pepper, might also be considered a concept album, except the “concept” is that there is no concept. To which you might reply, “Well that’s not a concept.” But, I mean, there really is no concept. Like, there are no rules. Your song resembles three songs in one (“Happiness is a Warm Gun”)? Fine. Your song only resembles half a song (“Wild Honey Pie”)? Fine. Your song doesn’t even resemble a song (“Revolution 9”)? Fine. Fuck it!

How crazy is the White Album?

It isn’t even called the White Album.

But that sense of gleeful, rampant, almost deliberate disorder gives it, I think, a quality that no other Beatles album possesses: a genuine air of danger to it. There’s a fire to this one, an aggression. Anything can happen. God (AKA George Martin’s idea of a “proper, English” Beatles album) is dead. This one is violent, confrontational, out of control. If you’re not careful, the White Album just might jump out from behind the bushes and slit your throat.

Not only would I consider it their most “dangerous” album, but also their “creepiest.” Which is not to overlook several supremely creepy moments on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, or Magical Mystery Tour, but for me, certain White Album moments rise to “next-level creepy” territory. Forget obvious culprits like “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9”; I’m referring to more unexpectedly creepy inclusions like “Sexy Sadie,” “Long, Long, Long,” “Cry Baby Cry,” or what could possibly be considered the hands-down creepiest moment in the entire Beatles catalog: the nameless 30-second snippet following “Cry Baby Cry” that is pleading the listener to be “taken back,” although to precisely where is not clear. No, I can’t take you back. I never brought you here in the first place. Leave me alone!

In his essay for the 50^th anniversary deluxe edition booklet, John Harris describes his own similar experience of being exposed to the album at ten years old:

Some of the songs, it transpired, were seemingly straightforward, and instantly enjoyable. But others were as unsettling as the sleeve. Why did “Glass Onion” suddenly stop for those weird strings? Why could I hear John’s voice wailing away in the instrumental coda of “Yer Blues”? What on earth had happened at the end of “Long, Long, Long”? “Helter Skelter” was downright scary. So was “Cry Baby Cry.” The day after taking the album home, I sat through it all, and had my first experience of “Revolution 9” – and I can still recall the mixture of bafflement and unease it triggered. Side four, I quickly concluded, was like some dark attic that you had to summon the courage to peer into, let alone explore.

Yep. Herman Melville, of course, might have pinpointed the source of its creepiness to the color of its album cover – or rather, the absence of color:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?

Precisely. And yet, how’s this for contradictions? This “creepiest” and most “dangerous” of Beatles album might also be the funniest. Its detractors (such as my father) tend to point to the preponderance of “joke” tracks as an example of the collection’s spottiness and disposability, to which I say two things: 1) You mean joke songs are a bad thing?; 2) I think the Beatles, unlike, say, Frank Zappa, still found a way to sneak in hints of honest emotional depth into their “joke” songs, so that they were never merely joke songs.

Listening to “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” I still pick up Lennon’s disdain for the rich American asshole who came to India to shoot its precious wildlife instead of to explore the country’s spiritual heritage (as the Beatles were allegedly trying to do). Listening to “Rocky Raccoon,” even though I understand that this is a farcical country & western pastiche, I can’t help but root for the downtrodden hero’s “revival.” Listening to “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” a song inspired by Paul seeing two monkeys become … familiar with each other, I find it an amusingly off-the-cuff commentary on the differences between human and animal attitudes toward reproduction. Somehow, the Beatles’ coping mechanism for dealing with the absurdity of the world in which we live, to a degree which I find equally delightful and disturbing, resembles my own.

Is it my favorite Beatles album? Although I have the utmost respect for those who would make such a claim, I’ve never entertained that notion myself. And yet, I don’t desire for the album to be anything other than what it is. It exists in a category of one. It cannot be avoided or ignored. If you consider yourself even a casual observer of 20^th century Western culture, sooner or later, you must reckon with the White Album, whether you prefer to do so or not. It will not stay in the attic for long.

*****

And now, I would like to attempt what no Beatles fan has ever attempted before. I would like to discuss and evaluate, at least in brief, every single track on the White Album. But rather than go straight through the running order, or rank them from “worst to best,” like a normal blogger would do, my plan is to divide the songs into five distinct categories of my own making.

Like a Southern politician’s positions, one’s personal affinity for various White Album tracks is ever-evolving. I never got those hardcore Beatles fans who would sit around and decree, “This song shouldn’t have been on the White Album, that song shouldn’t have been on the White Album …”

I have never, not for one millisecond, felt like doing this.

I would remove nothing. NOTHING. Give it all to me, damn it. Just because I may not love every song doesn’t mean that I don’t want every song. Nevertheless, some White Album tracks, to paraphrase George Orwell, are more equal than others.

Songs That Never Used to Be Among My Favorites and Aren’t Really Among My Favorites Now

“Back in the U.S.S.R.”

Relax – I’m not saying the album’s opening (and arguably most famous) track isn’t “great.” I’ve just always had the nagging feeling that, musically, I should like it more than I do. My general thought is that the final mix, at least, is a bit stiff and overcrowded, as if it’s throwing several sounds at my ears without gelling like it wants to. Is the absence of Mr. Starkey a factor? Are the imitation Beach Boy backing vocals a little gimmicky and annoying, if thematically appropriate? Hard to put my finger on it.

Oddly, I’ve found myself more enamored of the slower, earlier, “instrumental-only” mix that was recently released on the 50^th anniversary deluxe edition; it’s turned a song I’ve heard a thousand times into something a bit fresher. At that slower tempo, suddenly I feel like the track grooves more. And the sloppy, dirty texture of the guitars, separated more cleanly across the stereo spectrum in this mix, feels, dare I say it, Velvet Underground-ish?

Am I suggesting that the Beatles should have released this half-finished, wordless take on the final album instead of the version they did release? Don’t get cute with me.

Because these lyrics are a riot. “Back In the U.S.S.R.” is like six-dimensional satire. In one concentrated blast, I’m fairly certain that the Beatles’ rather cheeky bass player has managed to poke fun at: 1) Chuck Berry (“Back in the U.S.A.”); 2) the Beach Boys (“Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls”) ; 3) the omnipresent bleakness that presumably would have been daily life for most citizens of the Soviet Union; 4) the Western world’s arrogance in assuming that no one could possibly be “glad” to be returning to that frost-covered dump; 5) the unpleasantness of 1960s air travel; 6) some intellectual or metaphysical concept that only Paul McCartney could have glimpsed through his own puppy dog eyes.

Seriously though, what’s the best way to cope with the mind-numbingly pervasive threat of Cold War geopolitical tension? Crack a joke about it! Even as a young man with limited knowledge of the historical situation to which McCartney was referring, I could appreciate the sardonic irony of a man singing about the act of returning to the U.S.S.R. as if he were simply elated to be doing so, extolling the virtues of the females of various regions (“Ukraine,” “Moscow,” “Georgia”) whose names tended to conjure up images of shivering bread lines and tattered woolen coats rather than surf boards and bikinis. And the puns, oh the puns. “Moscow girls make me sing and shout/That Georgia’s always on my mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mind.” Not that Georgia, the other Georgia. Get it?

And yet, despite the veiled disdain, I still wouldn’t refer to the song as a mean-spirited slam or a put-down of any of his targets, which is perhaps why those few Soviets brave enough to sneak clandestine copies of this fine example of “Western decadence” into their homeland apparently embraced the song (sort of like how Angelenos have come to embrace Randy Newman’s not-entirely-sincere “I Love L.A.”?). Rather, it’s more about the bizarre cultural juxtaposition – Paul easing his discomfort with the fear and chaos of a volatile situation far beyond his control by employing humor. He’s playing part-time Buddhist chess while other rock satirists are playing checkers.

“Glass Onion”

As John’s attempt to, in the parlance of our times, “troll” Beatles fans, I feel like this kind of song could have only reached a certain level. Plus, I’ve always been bothered by the fact that the couplets preceding the chorus never rhyme (“Standing on the cast iron shore yeah/Lady Madonna tryin’ to make ends meet yeah”; “Fixing a hole in the ocean/Tryin’ to make a dove-tail joint”). And another thing: if the ostensible purpose of your song is to reference other Beatles songs, then why make references to things that aren’t in Beatles songs (like “cast iron shore” and “dove-tail joint”)? I demand logical consistency from my fan-baiting Lennon tracks, damn it.

“Birthday”

Quick tip to struggling songwriters everywhere: You know how to guarantee that your brand new composition, whether brilliant, atrocious, or anywhere in between, will experience a long and fruitful afterlife? Make it a song about birthdays.

According to my sources, John and Paul tossed this one off in approximately 20 minutes, and that sounds about right to me. “I would like you to dance/Take a cha-cha-cha-chance”? Really guys? Are we sure we want to go with that? I guess I’ve never been especially enamored of its recycled “Oh! Pretty Woman” guitar riff, standard blues chord progression, or the final mix that, aside from the vocals, is essentially in mono. Even my favorite section – the dirty, gnarly “Yes we’re going to a party party” section – is fairly brief, and only appears once. But sure, I still break this one out at Christmas like everyone else.

“Revolution 1”

In my view, the 45 version of “Revolution,” which the Beatles released in August 1968 along with “Hey Jude,” may be the crunchiest, heaviest, fuzziest, feistiest, catchiest, and all-around most ass-kicking record they ever committed to tape, managing to be political but in a mature and thoughtful way, with the most magnificently part-time Buddhist set of lyrics to ever come out of John Lennon’s mouth (“Don’t you know it’s gonna be! All right …”).

And then there’s this … other version?

I’m often supportive of the Beatles, particularly in their solo years, releasing two different versions of the same track (examples: “Junk” and “Singalong Junk”; “Isn’t It a Pity” versions #1 and #2), but with “Revolution,” I’m so firmly in the “single version” camp that I’ve always found the album version, by comparison, a bit of a chore to get through. I would like to A) thank John for demanding that the song be released as a single, and B) thank Paul and George for demanding that, if the song was going to be released as a single, then the group needed to completely rework it.

“Revolution 1” has all these additions I never asked for. Horns? Didn’t need them. “Shoo-be-doo-wop” backing vocals? Wasn’t missing them. Outro with squawking bird noises? Wasn’t asking for that either. To me, the other version is “the” version. “Revolution 1” is like the version of “Revolution” that would exist in the “upside down” from Stranger Things – just kind of slimy and grey.

“Good Night”

So John decides to write a tender lullaby for his son, instead of actually, you know, raising him? And then he gives it to Ringo to sing? Did I get that right? Also, you know how both Paul and George Martin bemoaned the bombastic strings and choral arrangement that Phil Spector slathered onto “The Long and Winding Road”? Uh … what was the difference between that arrangement and the arrangement Martin came up with for “Good Night”?

That said, my lack of enthusiasm for the closing track of one of my all-time favorite albums has never bothered me very much, because, well, the White Album isn’t your typical album that needs a typical closing track, is it? Plus, I’ve always admired how utterly non-“Revolution 9”-esque it is. These guys had some balls.

Songs That Used to Be Among My Favorites But Aren’t Really Among My Favorites Now

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”

There are certain Beatles fans (even certain White Album fans) who utterly despise “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Like, they consider it a crime against humanity, along with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. Those people all need to step outside, stare up at a fluffy, billowy cloud, and take a nice, deep breath. Just because both John and George went on record as expressing their dislike of this song doesn’t mean that Beatles fans like me have to agree with them.

Similarly to “With a Little Help from My Friends,” I initially came to know “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” from a non-Beatles cover version as utilized in a TV theme song – in this case, Life Goes On (AKA “Oh my God, the actor playing a kid with Down Syndrome actually has Down Syndrome”). So when I came across the Beatles version about a year or so later, I thought to myself, “Hey! It’s that song from Life Goes On!” We establish our bonds in any way we can.

Then one day, perhaps in my early twenties, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” ceased to grab me like it once did. If anything, I almost prefer listening to the earlier take, initially released on Anthology 3 (probably because I’m not as sick of it?), that features heavier use of acoustic guitar and maracas and generally seems to skip along at a brisker pace.

However, that earlier take is missing many of the goofy, oddball touches that I think make the released version zestier, such as:

• Lennon’s furiously-pounded barrelhouse piano intro
• “Desmond lets the children lend a hand” (“Arm!” “Leg!”)
• Barking dog
• “Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face/And in the evening she’s a singer with the band” – say what?

Just because I enjoy the less overplayed, earlier version more than the released version nowadays doesn’t mean I think the Beatles released the wrong version.

“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”

The youth in me gorged on the utter daftness of this one. How daft is “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”? Let me count the ways:

1. “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”? Like this was the sequel to an earlier song about Bungalow Bill?
2. “So Captain Marvel zapped him right between the eyyyyye-zah!”
3. The one solitary “munchkin” Lennon who gleefully shouts, before each chorus, “All the children sing!”
4. A downward key change – in the chorus?
5. The impressive flamenco guitar that begins the track: “Hmm, I didn’t know the Beatles could play like that. Wait, what do you mean, it’s just some random guitarist on a pre-recorded tape that came with their mellotron?”

“Martha My Dear”

I had a pretty strong crush on this one for a couple of years, particularly the swinging brass interlude that’s goosed along by Paul’s handclaps. Did I care that it was about his sheepdog? Do people care that “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was about Keith Richards’s gardener? No. No, they don’t.

I mean, it’s amazing how much ingenuity Paul could pack into a song about a freaking sheepdog. There’s the opening motif (essentially the “chorus”), which slides into the “Hold your head up” section, with its “oompa-oompa” tuba, which then slides into an entirely new, unexpectedly angry section (“Take a good look around you”) pushed along by a barking electric guitar. The man had ideas.

Whenever I’ve read analyses of the White Album, this one often comes out near the bottom end, and I can’t quite fathom it. Maybe if it hadn’t been been given such a prominent spot as the leadoff track to side two? (Also, notice how every single leadoff track for every side of the White Album has ended up in my “lesser favorites” pile; not sure how to interpret this, but again, the normal rules simply may not apply.)

“Piggies”

A lot of venom has been thrown this one’s way as well, but I can say with pride that 12-year-old me ate it up like a starving hog at the trough. The bridge, where George’s voice is filtered through a “tinny, distant” effect, used to send me in a giggling tizzy, especially when the tinny, distant Georges multiply to punctuate the coup de grace of “damn good whacking!” And then on the third verse, everyone sounds like pigs! Capital! I also enjoy the false ending, where George’s devilish little “One more time” is interrupted by the forceful last gasp of strings, as if the wealthy snobs he’s been satirizing are appalled at their carefully prepared and properly aristocratic exit being interrupted by a lowly Liverpudlian, and feel the need to reassert their superiority with one final flourish.

“Rocky Raccoon”

“Her name was Magill, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy.”

Need I say more?

Well, I should say one thing more, which I alluded to earlier: while quite blatantly a pastiche/satire of an American folk and/or country ballad, I find Paul’s storytelling and performing abilities so compelling that I can’t help but gasp in horror when poor Rocky takes a bullet, and cheer for his recovery as intensely as the audience at a performance of Peter Pan might do as they clap their hands in order to keep Tinkerbell from expiring.

Q: When is a joke not a joke? A: When it’s on the White Album.

“Don’t Pass Me By”

A number one single in Denmark (look it up). Also, according to George Harrison, the favorite White Album track of the Band.

This album features many a superlative lyric, but the absolute finest lyric on the album could very well be the following couplet:

I’m sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair
You were in a car crash, and you lost your hair

See, this is what happens when you let the drummer write a song, folks.

As a young man, I don’t know what surprised me more: that Ringo, six years into the Beatles’ recording career, finally wrote a song, or that when Ringo, six years into the Beatles’ recording career, finally wrote a song, it was a song … that I liked!

With its herky-jerky piano that sounds like it’s being played at the bottom of the ocean, “Don’t Pass Me By” approximates the feeling of an average evening as lived by Ringo Starr, not in 1968, but in 1978. So in a sense, perhaps it was ahead of its time? That said, I’d always found it confusing that the first-ever composition by the Beatles’ drummer featured such sloppy, ramshackle drumming. Well, according to the liner notes in the 50^th anniversary deluxe edition, it turns out that Paul may have been playing the drums on “Don’t Pass Me By” instead.

How crazy is the White Album? When the band’s drummer finally wrote his very first song, he didn’t even bother to drum on it.

“Yer Blues”

Back in the day, I adored “Yer Blues” with the passion of a thousand eye-picking eagles and bone-licking worms, particularly the moment where Ringo taps his sticks together as John shouts “Even hate my rock and roll!!” and it shifts from its stop-start rhythm into that exhilarating “swung” feel (and do I hear an extra snare overdub a la “Hey Bulldog”?). But then one day, I dunno, I kinda got sick of “Yer Blues.” Still, I probably (and ironically) find more searing intensity in John’s tongue-in-cheek blues pastiche than I find in the contemporaneous British blues rock of Ten Years After, Savoy Brown, and Jeremy Spencer’s questionable Elmore James impressions on those early Fleetwood Mac albums.

Weird Songs That Bother a Lot of People but Don’t Really Bother Me

“Wild Honey Pie”

If my nose hairs formed a jugband and teamed up with the local retirement home, the end result might sound something like this. But I … kind of like it?

“Why Don’t We Do It in The Road”

This one’s a bit too lyrically complex for me, but give me a few more listens. Contrary to popular belief, the lyrics to this song are not simply “Why don’t we do it in the road?” For instance, the full lyrics to the third verse are:

Ohhhh (falsetto whoop) WHAAAH don’t weh do-it in-the-road?
Why don’t we do-EHHT in the ROAH-uh-oade-uh?
Why don’t we DA-DOO-it, DO it in the ROOOAH-uh-ude?

And of course:

Why don’t we do it AEHHHN thuh ROAH-uh-ode?

Just to be accurate.

But again, what on the surface seems like an intentionally stupid ditty is more like a compact philosophical nugget. Per the 50^th anniversary edition booklet: “The idea for the words was triggered by observing two monkeys copulating on the road in India.” I can see it now: Paul witnessing an act that humans tend to invest with immense baggage, emotional anxiety, ornate custom, and moral caution, and then juxtaposing the human treatment of sex with the carefree, oblivious, psychologically unburdened monkey treatment of sex, rushing back to his tent, hoisting his acoustic guitar into the humid Indian air, and proclaiming, “I think I’ve got another one!”

Indeed, why don’t we do it in the road? Probably because we don’t want to get hit by a car, is my guess.

That said, in the “intentionally repetitive Beatles songs” hierarchy, it’s no “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).”

“Revolution 9”

It’s your favorite Beatles song? OMG, it’s my favorite Beatles song too. Aside from about 212 other Beatles songs.

“Revolution 9” has inspired, within many a purchaser of the White Album, feelings of downright anger – resentment even. But honestly, I’ve always gotten a good chuckle out of it. You want to feel angry and resentful? Go listen to Two Virgins, The Wedding Album, or side two of Live Peace in Toronto, and then maybe we can talk. It’s always been crystal clear to me that “Revolution 9” was an “experiment” and not meant to be considered a proper “song.” I mean, this is the Beatles’ crazy double album – it needed to get balls-to-the-wall crazy, you know? Some call it a waste of eight minutes, but … I just can’t imagine the album without it. “Revolution 9” is too essential to the lore. Maybe there’s a touch of post-1968 unfairness here, because I know to expect it, whereas those who bought the album in 1968 were caught wholly unawares and thus might have felt slightly cheated. Still, I never bother to skip it. I might even like it more than “Good Night,” so what does that say about my mental health?

A little while back, my favorite pair of YouTube “song reactors,” Andy and Alex, posted a highly engrossing video of the two of them listening to the White Album for the very first time, and when they finally made it to “Revolution 9,” this priceless look came across their unsuspecting faces that I could only describe as “What the fuuuh?” A bemused chortle inevitably escaped my chest. Once the album finished, Andy valiantly attempted to form his conflicted thoughts into words:

“I will say, I feel like if you’re gonna be on a desert island, or an insane asylum, and you can only have one song, that might be a good song, cause there’s SO MUCH … you get any other song, you’re gonna actually go insane; that will at least keep you entertained. You’ll still be insane, but at least you might feel like you’re not insane. Imagine, takes you like five years, but you’re like, ‘I GOTTA FIGURE IT OUT…’ At first I was trying to theorize what was going on, and at first I thought it sounded kinda like, kinda like going through … almost like you’re fast-forwarding through someone’s life, and you’re like catching all these different points, and then I felt like, ‘Are we, like, time traveling, are we, like, following the human species?’ and then we got to war, and then we got to, like, guns shooting, and then we got to, like, laser beams, I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ and then you hear, like, fire, it’s like, ‘OK, did we, like, nuke ourselves and now it’s like the Fire Age again, like, what is going on here?’”

Exactly.

Top nine most deranged John Lennon “Revolution 9” vocal snippets:

Honestly, I can only come up with seven, but I obviously had to say “top nine” because, I mean, number nine.

Songs That Didn’t Used to Be Among My Favorites but Are Among My Favorites Now

“Blackbird”

I used to find it folky and kinda boring; now I find it folky and kinda hypnotic and soothing. McCartney has claimed it’s about the civil rights movement, a claim which I can neither confirm nor deny, although a friend once surmised that, if you break the lyrics down a little more closely, you could conclude that its imagery is arguably more ambiguous than hopeful: “Blackbird fly/Into the light of a dark black night”? Is a bird that’s flying “into the light of a dark black night” flying toward a fate that is liberating … or ominous?

“I Will”

This is one of those White Album tracks that I didn’t even bother to wave hello to when I used to spot it every evening on my way home from work, and then one day, I stopped in the middle of the street, got down on my knees, and out of the blue, proposed marriage to it. The acoustic fingerpicking is so bright and shimmery. It’s like someone pouring melodic McCartney marmalade all over my tongue – and I’m guessing this was probably only the third best song he wrote that week. Even when he was trying to sabotage a track with a preposterous instrumental idea like, say, chanting “doomp, doomp” instead of playing bass guitar, he made it work.

“Julia”

Copy what I said about “Blackbird” and paste it here. So, I had a friend in high school to whom I preached the Beatle gospel and proudly converted. One day, while listening to the White Album, he told me that he considered “Julia” to be not only the best song on the album, but the best song in the entire Beatles catalog. Uh … I was never especially huge on it myself, but after hearing my friend come out so passionately for it, I started re-examining my position. Incidentally, that friend had a rather complicated relationship with his own mother, and ended up marrying a Japanese woman, so there you go.

“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey”

With all due respect to “I Call Your Name” or “You Can’t Do That,” this has to be the best usage of cowbell in a Beatles song. I picture Mrs. Pendlestone’s first grade class touring the fire station, and the crew chief just telling the kids, “Hey, knock yourself out.” (According to the 50^th anniversary edition booklet, the first grader in question appears to be one James Paul McCartney.) It’s also got, in classic Lennon fashion, roughly seventeen nutty time changes: 1) The opening that always tricks me into mis-hearing where the beat is placed (a la “Drive My Car,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Street Fighting Man,” or the Who’s “I’m Free”); 2) The disorienting turnaround at the end of each chorus; 3) The gnarly instrumental breakdown that feels like it should go on for either four or eight measures, but stops at six (?!).

I’ve heard it said that John wrote most of the lyrics by paraphrasing various sayings of the Maharishi, but does anyone else think that lines like “The deeper you fly, the higher you go” and “Your inside is out when your outside is in” almost give it the feel of an early ‘60s “dance craze” pastiche, albeit one with a gleefully nonsensical chorus – sort of like a demented “Hokey Pokey”? I also love how ear-shreddingly intense John belts out the otherwise absurd title. A non-English speaker would probably assume he was singing something along the lines of “Please don’t leave me baby!” And perhaps he was: I believe in later years John commented that the “monkey” in question was Yoko, which makes me admire a band that can write a song about a woman as if she were a monkey, and write a song about a sheepdog as if she were a woman (“Martha My Dear”) – all on the very same album.

I must not neglect to mention the spicy hoots and hollers peppered in the background throughout this madness. Indeed, at the two minute mark, behold how the track is suddenly invaded by what sounds like the three-eyed aliens from Toy Story, chanting “come on come on come on come on” as if they’re praying to their pagan claw deity, only for George and Paul to swoop down the scale with some brief, fuzzed-out riffage, before Ringo abruptly drops out, leaving George and Paul to jam on the same riff for those six (?!) measures while John’s multi-tracked island of penguins continues to yammer away, only for Ringo and that blessed cowbell to come roaring back in, scattering the penguins across the stereo spectrum and back into the freezing waters.

“Long, Long, Long”

In my youth, perhaps I found this one a bit low-key; maybe I needed a little more maturity under my belt in order to find my way into its hushed, hymnal charms. This one certainly wins the award for “Most Unexpectedly Intense, Moving, Yearning Bridge on the White Album.” It may take a “Long, Long, Long” time to build its way up to it, but once Ringo lets the drums truly be heard and assistant producer Chris Thomas comes barreling in on piano, George turns the passion up several notches: “So many tears I was searching/So many tears I was waaaay-sting.” Is it just me, or do sentiments that, in another’s hands, could have been corny or trite, somehow feel so nakedly sincere and direct in the hands of George Harrison? I want to make fun of his sanctimonious religiosity, but I just feel like a jerk.

As he and Paul wring every last drop of drama out of the transition back to the verse with a glorious “Ohhhh-oh!,” I can literally see George extending his arms up to the sky in a desperate effort to touch God, or Krishna, or whatever the hell he felt like calling his belief system that day. In that sense, the outro, with Paul’s Bach-like organ chords, George’s brittle string scratching, Ringo’s aggressive snare roll, and (I believe) a bottle rattling on top of a speaker, is like the sound of George transforming into an eight-armed Hindu god and levitating himself into another dimension a la Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi.

“Honey Pie”

In the pantheon of McCartney-composed, music hall-inspired Beatles numbers, I’d always been more of a “Your Mother Should Know” or a “When I’m Sixty-Four” sort of guy; “Honey Pie” just seemed to hit its mark without stepping beyond its boundaries or offering up any unexpected surprises. Then one day I realized … you know, considering Lennon’s attempts at being a tortured avant-garde junkie rocker and Harrison’s attempts at being a pious hippie Hari Krishna Zen master, “Honey Pie” might be the tongue-in-cheek raspberry noise that side four of this album needed.

Undisputed highlight: At the mid-point of the solo, Paul slips into his best Louis Armstrong (?) impersonation, uttering a raspy “I like it like that, ooh-hah!,” then climbs into falsetto with an absurdly campy “I like this kinda hot kinda muuuu-sic, hot kinda music,” as if he were smearing his sweaty hands all over his body, the sedate backing track putting his entire being into the talismanic thrall of pure orgasmic lust, before finally composing himself with “play it to me, play it to me Hollywood blues” in time for the final verse.

But again, here’s another White Album “joke” song that strikes me as more than just a joke, since I find it functioning as a sly commentary on post-war Britain having generally lost its cultural and geopolitical supremacy to America, the singer asking, futilely, though with admirable English politeness, “Will the wind that blew her boat across the sea/Kindly send her sailing back to me?”

“Savoy Truffle”

Another one of those White Album tracks that, at a glance, has the air of a fluffy, light-hearted throwaway to it (the song was inspired by chocolate – no, literally), but don’t let the candy-coated shell fool you, because I detect some startlingly real menace and venom in its two bridges. Bridge #1: “You might not feel it now/But when the pain cuts through, you’re gonna know and how/The sweat is gonna fill your head/When it becomes too much, you shout aloud.” Translation: no surface pleasures come untethered from a brutal downside. Bridge #2: “You know that what you eat you are/But what is sweet now turns so sour/We all know ‘Ob-La-Di, Bla-Da,’ but can you show me where you are?” Hold on, is this George … sneaking some genuine intra-band tension into this apparently good-natured Stax soul pastiche, by making what sounds to me like a cloaked swipe at Paul’s pushiness and insincerity? If so, did Paul … notice? Or was he too busy grooving on his bass and chipping in with gritty backing vocals to care? I suspect that not even his bandmate’s sour little digs could dull Paul’s innately sweet disposition. Sorry, George.

“Cry Baby Cry”

Although I did a more thorough job of recording the entirety of KFRC’s “Beatles A to Z Weekend” better than any eleven-year-old boy had any reasonable right to, I must confess that, alas, due to my noble attempt to keep the cassettes commercial-free, I neglected to press “record” at the end of certain advertising breaks, and thus, ended up missing about five or six tracks – one of these tracks being “Cry Baby Cry.” Not the biggest miss, surely?

But as a result, for many years, this remained one of the few Beatles tracks that my ears rarely heard – a Beatles Halley’s Comet, if you will. Nevertheless, when I finally got around to listening to the full White Album on vinyl, it wasn’t “Cry Baby Cry” that gripped me per se, so much as the mysteriously untitled, 30-second snippet that followed, commonly known as “Can You Take Me Back?” Where had I … heard that before? Hmm. I couldn’t establish precisely where, and yet, it felt eerily familiar. Suddenly, with the icy chill of revelation, I knew.

My God.

You see, when I had pressed “record” so many years earlier to capture the start of “A Day in the Life” (which follows “Cry Baby Cry” in alphabetical order), I had captured a crossfade between the dying embers of “Can You Take Me Back?” and the initial chords of “A Day in the Life.”

And this sudden realization creeped … me … out.

I mean, the opening seconds of “A Day in the Life” are haunting enough already as they are. Adding this ghostly fragment, this song that is not quite a song, this spirit without a home, on top of that? Suddenly understanding where that fragment had originated, I felt like I’d witnessed the howling gurgle of a long-deceased murder victim calling out to me from an alternate dimension, or like I was staring directly into a painting from Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Popes” series. I wanted to shove that terrifying non-song back into the demonic box from whence it came, and never let it out again.

One day, a short while later, my brother and I decided to do something that no pair of siblings had ever attempted to do before: sit around the record player and listen to the entire White Album in full. But as we crept closer and closer to “Cry Baby Cry,” the dread began to gnaw at me. There was one little section I couldn’t bring myself to listen to. That’s right: when the needle came to “Can You Take Me Back?,” I turned the volume down.

My brother flipped out.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Oh, we don’t need to hear this part.”

“What? What are you talking about? We’re supposed to listen to the whole album!”

“Naw, this is just some little bit of a song, I don’t wanna hear it.”

“No! Stop! You messed the whole thing up!”

At the time, my actions made perfect sense to me, but in retrospect, I guess my brother had a point.

However, as my teen years continued to unfold, and I began to experience more corporeal forms of dread in my everyday existence, this led me to believe that perhaps I could finally face the sort of predictable, fixed dread that lay nestled within the confines of my favorite band’s discography, sort of like Jesse Eisenberg at the end of The Squid and the Whale confronting the museum exhibit that had terrified him as a child. One day, I dared to listen to “Can You Take Me Back?” and not lift the needle. To my astonishment and relief, I survived.

So yeah, “Cry Baby Cry.” Perhaps having hardly listened to it at the peak of my youthful Beatles worship means that my ears find the song not-so-overplayed, or perhaps, with its grey, Victorian, drizzle-ridden vibe, I would have gravitated toward it regardless. I suspect that it may have absorbed traces of its 30-second companion’s eeriness simply by osmosis.

For instance, take what we might call “The case of the increasingly spooky vocal.” At the start, Lennon’s dry, plain vocal is hard-panned to the left (with a heavily “phlanged” acoustic guitar hard-panned to the right). But wait, what’s this? On the second chorus, his vocal appears to become … double-tracked? Fair enough, but hold on, what’s this? On the third chorus, his vocal sounds like it’s reverted back to being single-tracked again, but this time, it’s gained a creepy echo, and on the final “Cry Baby Cry” of the chorus, it’s joined by a dash of extremely faint and equally creepy backing vocals in the center channel.

These vocals just won’t stay still.

Then on the fourth chorus, the extremely faint and creepy backing vocals join in a little earlier this time (“She’s old enough to know better/So cry baby cry”). Then on the last chorus (beginning with “Cry, cry, cry baby”), Lennon’s left-panned vocal is joined in the center by some sort of … distant, fractured, half-human remnant of Lennon’s soul? What is that?

See, with the Beatles, it’s always the little things.

Songs That Used to Be Among My Favorites and Are Among My Favorites Still

“Dear Prudence”

A few years back, I finally watched Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, a film-going experience that I might compare to the sensation of attending a Beatles theme park (one that perhaps features chain-smoking, disgruntled employees prancing around in Walrus, Bulldog, and Octopus costumes?), but I digress. At one point, the characters began singing “Dear Prudence,” and I thought to myself, “Man … when was the last time a contemporary recording artist released a song that felt like this?”

What I mean is, “Dear Prudence” strikes me as encouraging and life-affirming, but in such a … direct, naked way. It doesn’t care about being “cool.” It doesn’t feature a single word that an eight-year-old wouldn’t understand (although the phrase “daisy chain” might throw them for a loop?). It is neither cloaked in irony and smarminess nor is it corny, ham-fisted, or calculated. It’s basically John’s “Hey Jude”: “Dear Prudence, don’t make it bad, take a sad meditation retreat and make it better.” In other words, if someone else tried to write a song like this, it might have come out cloying and infantile, but when a raging asshole such as John Lennon writes a song like this, somehow, it lands a bit harder.

Now, if I had happened to have been in the Beatles, and John had come into the studio and said, “Guys, I’m just gonna do this on acoustic guitar, like I did with ‘Julia,’” then lazy, uncreative me probably would have said, “Yeah, sure John, sounds great.” Fortunately, his real-life bandmates decided to help him flesh things out a bit more than I would have. Because listening to the Beatles’ arrangement of “Dear Prudence” makes me feel like I’m discovering a secret passageway to Narnia or Terabithia or some enchanted, sylvan kingdom which only a select few are allowed to enter.

It all begins so simply, with a finger-picked electric guitar (which sort of sounds like an acoustic guitar?) descending its way, key-by-key, toward the proper start of the first verse, like rays of sunlight descending through a forest. When John’s vocal enters, the instruments are like hesitant animals, only willing to come out of the bushes one or two at a time. Initially, Paul’s solitary bass note is joined by a courageous tambourine, until the entrance of Paul’s drumming gives the tambourine the extra jolt of confidence it needs to rattle further, only for a cymbal crash to cause the timid woodland critters to scatter thence. Paul’s drumming at the start of the second verse has been frightened back into a halftime rhythm, although his bass perhaps feels emboldened and slips in a few more notes than before. Only when John belts out “See the sunny sky-ha-hi-hiiiiiiiii …” do the previously hidden gnomes and wood sprites chime in on both sides of the stereo spectrum with a falsetto “hiiiiiiiiii,” and I’m thinking, “My God, which scene in Bambi have I found myself in?”

Unlike the cymbal crash at the end of the first verse, the cymbal crash at the end of the second verse apparently opens up a wormhole featuring an electric guitar on the left channel that sounds like it’s bouncing around inside an antique cuckoo clock. “Look around,” John commands, as his fellow concealed trolls and gargoyles proceed to chant “round-round-round” in a sinister tone and it’s like the whole song is suddenly spinning on a rope swing. Perhaps sensing the listener growing dizzy, John and his chanting cult companions calm the situation down with a drawn-out “Look arouuuuu-owwww-owwww-ound,” Paul smacks another cymbal, I’m off the swing, and my nausea can abate.

By the third verse, all the animals have crawled out of their nests to clap along, but the gathering takes a turn toward the chaotic after “Won’t you let me see you smile?” with Paul attempting to smash the spider that’s hopped onto his drum kit, while a gang of twittering birds swoops down on the right channel (in the form of tinkling piano notes), as if they’re pissed off that they only got word of the party just as it was winding down. At last, Paul succeeds in crushing the arachnid, steadies his rhythm, and then with one last cymbal crash, sends that bouncy electric guitar on the left channel skittering off in fright, like a wounded kinky boot beast, until all that remains is the original electric guitar on the right channel, cycling and cycling its way through its key changes once more until, only in the final fading glimpse of twilight, it hits that magical first chord of the verse, and then … the séance is over.

I’m standing in the middle of the now-serene grove, rubbing my eyes, asking myself, “Was it real, or just a dream?”

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

Legend has it that Elliott Smith, sort of the ‘90s one-man Beatle, would listen obsessively and repeatedly, not merely to individual songs, but to segments of individual songs. They say he would sit in a room for days on end (possibly high on ice cream and heroin) and play specific sections of tracks he liked, without even letting the rest of the track play through. Which always sounded nuts to me. But when I do it with the first fifteen seconds of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” it’s perfectly normal of course.

What strikes me about the introduction of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is how basic each of the four instrumental parts are, at least when examined in isolation. Any idiot could play this stuff:

1. George’s forcefully strummed acoustic guitar in the center channel
2. Ringo’s laughably uncomplicated drum pattern in the right channel, involving, from what I understand, dramatic use of the hi-hat
3. Paul’s (or possibly John’s?) bass guitar, also in the right channel, emitting one extremely grungy bass note about once every two seconds
4. Paul’s even more laughably uncomplicated piano part in the left channel, presumably the result of an evil sorcerer having placed a curse on him which forbid him to use more than one finger at a time. I believe, for the first five seconds, his finger doesn’t even switch notes. Chords do not appear to be involved. A person possessing only one finger could play this part.

Each element so appallingly basic, so insultingly devoid of virtuosity, and yet … arrange me a more arresting opening. Go ahead. Good luck. It sucks you right in, and Clapton hasn’t even shown up yet. It’s as if Julia Child decided to moonlight at a roadside diner one morning, and, using the same exact ingredients every other cook at every other diner has at their disposal, made the most flawless omelet imaginable. I’m not the first to say it, nor am I the last, but it wasn’t merely that the Beatles composed great songs, or performed them with such intensity of feeling, but that they were such skilled arrangers of their material.

Which requires me to address a certain opinion which I’ve seen casually tossed about since the release of Anthology 3 in 1996. There are those who claim to prefer the early “acoustic” version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” which appears on that collection (although I must boast that, through acquisition of a bootleg, I was one of the few to have heard this version before Anthology 3 was even a gleam in Apple Records’ eye). Oh sure, it’s a lovely version, with an extra verse to boot, and quite a welcome addition to the Beatles catalogue.

But those people are nuts. Give me the White Album version any day, and here’s why:

Because George was able to take this aching, trembling, fragile ballad … and make it rock.

On the early acoustic version, he sounds sensitive, forlorn, unnerved by the needless suffering he sees permeating the human condition, a situation which he observes with great perspicacity, although in a somewhat passive, helpless manner – disappointed, perhaps, except there isn’t much he’s going to do about it.

But on the White Album version, he sounds fiery, bitter, wrathful, like an angry deity out to wreak vengeance on an entire race of ignorant fools. The acoustic version is like New Testament George, while the White Album version is like Old Testament George. The White Album version is like him saying, “They’ve finally fucked with the wrong hippie.”

But not only were the Beatles skilled at turning simple instrumentation into ear candy, they also knew how to continuously introduce new elements into the arrangement without either 1) allowing the interest to sag, or; 2) adding so many elements that they stifled the flow or stunted the momentum. Because right around the 0:15 mark, George’s slightly off-kilter double-tracked lead vocals enter in the center, Clapton’s lead guitar enters on the left, and maybe it’s just me, but has the atmosphere grown a bit … heavier in here? There’s a delayed sloppiness to Clapton’s playing that makes it sound as if he’s lustily grinding against the rest of the band.

OK, so now we’ve got: drums, bass, piano, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, lead vocals … I think I know how this is going to go, I can finally settle in, right? Not so fast, because at the 0:31 mark, Ringo says adios to that hi-hat and busts out a snare-heavy fill, Paul slyly slips in with a soulful harmony vocal, and – my personal favorite – some extra little “tiki-tiki” percussion sounds appear on the left channel (castanets, or perhaps Ringo tapping the rims of a drum?). There’s just this languid stew of sound. But I’ve barely had fifteen seconds to wrap my head around that new paradigm when … what’s this? A key change and a bridge? They’ve reconfigured the furniture all over again.

Well, aside from the ghostly organ that adds bite to the bridge, the band has just about shown its instrumental hand at the 45-second mark, but seriously. Those first 45 seconds are unstoppable. And the crown for my favorite song on the White Album goes to … George?

But speaking of Paul’s backing vocals (I’ve touched on this a bit in my comments for “Long, Long, Long” and “Savoy Truffle”):

Like many a Beatles fan, I’ve always been fascinated by the distinct dynamics created between the individual pairings within the larger foursome. Think of a Magic: The Gathering aficionado, sitting in his basement building a “red and white” deck, a “red and black” deck, a “red and blue” deck, etc. John and Paul: this pairing has been discussed ad nauseum. George and Ringo: this pairing sounds like it was perhaps the most amiable. But George and Paul … I’ve always sensed a tremendous tension that was never quite resolved.

Has anyone else noticed how, after the break-up, George seemed to frequently complain about Paul for one reason or another (being forced to play Paul’s songs over and over again, being told what to do by Paul all the time), while hardly complaining about John? And yet, if one takes a closer look at who actually contributed meaningful instrumental and musical ideas to George’s few Beatles songs … it was almost always Paul.

Interesting.

I think Paul just struck some psychological nerve in George’s head that never quite dissipated. Still, and I wonder if I might be the first Beatles fan to ever write these words but … I feel like there’s a certain aura generated by the sound of George’s and Paul’s voices when paired together that adds a bit of additional magic beyond the “normal level” of magic that could be applied to every other aspect of the band. I think it’s the combination of George’s reedy, frail, higher-pitched voice backed by Paul’s deeper, more confident, more robust voice. Can you picture George’s lead vocals in “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” being backed by John’s raw, nasal shriek?

Harrison and McCartney: tempestuous musical brothers, chained together in perpetuity by their riveting musical chemistry, whether they liked it or not.

“Happiness Is a Warm Gun”

Ever wonder what the Abbey Road medley would have sounded like if it had been performed by a disgruntled junkie? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” I’m thinking Guided By Voices’ discography … starts here?

I’ve heard a lot of takes on a lot of White Album cuts, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a discouraging word sent in the direction of “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” which, like many, I find equal parts humorous, disturbing, and inspiring in that inimitable John Winston Lennon way. When the backing instrumentation suddenly ceases, and John croons “Happiness … is a warm, yes it is …” and he gives us that agonizingly, tantalizingly long pause, only to return with a triumphant, falsetto “Gunnnnnnn!,” it’s like the Death Star exploding. John has finally received his “fix.” Hooray, I guess?

Let me just say this: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is a hell of a one-two punch. As is written in the Bible (Deuteronomy, I believe): “Sometimes, life gives you ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Good Night’; other times, life gives you ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun.’”

“I’m So Tired”

If there were ever a Grammy category named “Songs That Sound Most Like Their Titles,” this could be the all-time winner. I can practically feel Lennon’s grogginess seeping through the speakers, dragging me into his lethargy. Kudos for the kind of details worthy of a Raymond Carver short story, such as “I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink” (you ever lie awake at night and think to yourself, “If I’m not asleep in thirty more minutes, I’m going to get a snack,” and then thirty minutes go by and you think, “OK, if I’m still not asleep in another thirty minutes, I’m going to get a snack”?) or my personal favorite, “And curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get.” Yeah, screw that guy.

The thing is, John doesn’t stay somnolent for long, all this ruminating apparently bringing his bile and frustration to the surface and causing the phrases to rush out of his mouth (“You’d-say … I’m-puttin’-you-on-but-it’s-no-joke … it’s-doin’-me-harm”), while Paul joins in with some suitably gritty backing vocals, and the intensity builds and builds and builds and then … he’s calm again. I’ve had those nights.

Arguable highlight: the second time around, when John unexpectedly climbs an octave on “goin’ insane!” Oh yeah.

“Mother Nature’s Son”

I see the songwriting credit that reads “Lennon-McCartney,” but if the credit read “Mother Nature Herself,” I would not be terribly shocked, because I feel like this song has about as many flaws in it as a mountain stream does.

Also: could a song ostensibly celebrating the majesty of rustic existence be any more … achingly melancholy? I feel like Paul isn’t so much prancing through “swaying daisies” and “fields of grass” as he is bidding adieu to God’s green earth for all eternity. This is the song about nature that a condemned man would write only twenty minutes before being stoned to death. I love the brief, jolly hint of a major key (“All day long I’m sitting singing songs for …”) that swiftly slips back into minor on “… everyone,” as if the clouds had parted for only half a second, only to reemerge and block out the sun once and for all.

Most jaw-dropping touch: the acoustic guitar that pops in on the right channel during the wordless outro and plays the most scintillating counter-melody, swooping downward precisely at the moment Paul’s scatting vocal climbs to its highest point (at 2:33).

“Sexy Sadie”

Hold on, does the skittering piano intro begin on the third bar of the verse melody? And could that echo on the piano crawl under my skin any more icily? I feel like there are points in this track (at 0:14 and 0:19, for instance) where the piano and guitar climb up into a range they’d almost rather not be in, as if they’re wincing every time they hit their highest note.

Which is fitting for a bitter, acidic, only slightly veiled John kiss-off track aimed at his meditation guru. But like Roger Waters (his disciple in misanthropy), I’ve always gotten the sense that John’s anger toward others usually contained a healthy heaping of self-loathing. What he resented, perhaps, wasn’t so much the Maharishi but his own gullibility, neediness, and eagerness to latch onto the latest (and latest to be rejected) pseudo-father figure. Thus, in cutting into his object of scorn, he was only cutting into himself. “You made a fool of everyone” – especially the songwriter, and that’s the part that chews at him.

Penning a charming ditty may get a bit of the nastiness off his chest, but he still comes out slightly damaged in the process. I once read John claim that he mostly wrote “How Do You Sleep?,” not about Paul, but about himself. How screwed up was this guy? Therefore, the main vibe I get, as John mournfully wails “However big you think you ah-ha-ha-ah-are” over the fadeout, is one of opportunity lost. The sadness is what sticks with me, not the anger.

Also: to anyone who thinks that Paul could have simply filled in for Ringo and drummed on the rest of the White Album as if no one would have been the wiser, I suggest a quick listen to “Sexy Sadie.” No need for me to even peek at the session notes to confirm who’s handling this one. It’s not particularly complicated drumming, but I feel like Ringo thwacks the snare with, shall we say, a different level of swagger. For a track that’s almost in ballad territory, these are some seriously biting drums here. Maybe he gave off an “easygoing” aura in daily life, but I suspect Ringo poured whatever elements of anger he carried around inside him into his drumming. And I love the way he (I think?) brushes the hi-hat for a split second before each punchy snare fill. There’s a tightness and attitude that I doubt Paul could have brought to the kit no matter how much he’d practiced at the craft. The difference: Paul could play the drums; Ringo lived and breathed the drums.

“Helter Skelter”

Think of all the savage, vicious impulses that the early, mop-top Beatles had quietly shoved into a dimly-lit storage unit that Brian Epstein must have rented somewhere on the outskirts of London – every nasty, barbarous thought that had attempted to bubble to the surface as they sweetly smirked their way through “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “From Me to You,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” etc. Then imagine, five years later, accidentally, unknowingly opening that storage unit.

“Helter Skelter” is the sound that would emerge.

All that oppressive cutesiness that had shoved their sinister id somewhere deep down into their psyches, where they might have wondered if it would ever re-emerge, came spewing out, in one concentrated four-minute-and-thirty-second blast, of their collective being. And, Ringo’s fingers aside, I think we were all the better for it.

You can’t have chaos without a little control, and what I love about “Helter Skelter” is how most of the elements are more or less following a semblance of order, from which a few elements prominently stray. Ringo’s drums, for instance, feel nice and steady on the right channel, until the first chorus arrives, when he suddenly adds a snare overdub on the left channel to really give the chorus that “out of whack” feel it was craving for.

And who aside from the Beatles would have added harmonies to a track like this? How crazy is the White Album? It’s the album that features a proto-metal track … with cool harmonies!

Conversation during the mixing session for “Helter Skelter”: “You know how ‘Strawberry Fields’ had that really weird fake ending that totally messed with everybody? Well what’s better than a fake ending? How about three fake endings?”

Fake Ending #1 (at 2:59): Ringo and John (on bass?) cease thumping away, Paul mumbles some gobbledygook in the right channel, and … that’s probably it, right? Well, hold on, there’s still a guitar bouncing between the stereo channels and then … what in God’s name is that? In the center channel, there is the sound of what I might describe as a jackhammer with indigestion, and then, at 3:09 … a saxophone screech (also played by John?!) acts as the clarion call for the creatures of the dark realm to return to battle.

Fake Ending #2 (at 3:37): OK, cool, a fade-out, I know what these are. That high-pitched, metallic squeal in the left channel that literally sounds like a roller coaster becoming untethered from its bearings is a little disturbing, but at least the nightmare is finally drawing to a close. Thank God, we’re safe. But … what’s this? No … stop … help! IT’S BACK. IT’S BAAAACK.

Fake Ending #3 (at 4:10): Ah, the real fade-out. Well that certainly was a dirty little trick they played, ha ha, very funny guys, and … Nope! The volume dramatically increases once more, allowing Ringo to place the final cherry on top of this sinister sundae.

*****

So much for my not having a lot to say about the White Album.

Anyway, there it is. I have finally established, once and for all, precisely what is great about the White Album and precisely what is not so great. It’s the last essay on the White Album that ever needs to be written. You can thank me later.

But “more than the sum of its parts” is a phrase that I’m convinced was invented just so humanity could use it to describe the Beatles, and I find that, despite the fragmented nature of the proceedings, the phrase applies just as well to the White Album itself. So what makes an album that touches on every possible subject under the sun and could hardly be reduced to one central, overriding “message” … part-time Buddhist?

I mean, the question partially answers itself. Life is messy. The White Album is messy. The White Album … is like life. Quick: name a human emotion. Odds are you’ll find it on the White Album. It’s all here: love, hate, sex, death, monkeys, piggies, raccoons, the Watusi, the Twist, soap impressions of your wife which you’ve eaten and donated to the National Trust, etc.

Really though, when it comes down to it, I think the Beatles’ entire recorded output is like one big poster boy for part-time Buddhism, and this Moby Dick of an album is no exception. Can you honestly get more part-time Buddhist than songs that: encourage reluctant hermits to “come out and play” (“Dear Prudence”); acknowledge the apparently all-pervasive inevitability of human suffering (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”); express longing for maternal connection (“Julia”), bask in the transient sublimity of a pastoral landscape (“Mother Nature’s Son”); stare into the beastly id rumbling underneath the thin veneer of civilization (“Helter Skelter,” “Revolution 9”), and so on?

The Beatles were so part-time Buddhist, down to their very marrow, that they couldn’t have avoided being part-time Buddhist even if they’d wanted to avoid it (although I think calling “Birthday” part-time Buddhist would be pushing it, given that, according to part-time Buddhism, one should approach every day with the same amount of awe and purpose as the day before, whether it is an individual marker of arbitrary biological significance or not).

But I think it all comes back to the album’s place in the Beatles’ broader story. For perhaps the White Album, in a sense, really is Sgt. Pepper, Part II. Because, once again, when presented with a golden opportunity to “play it safe,” the Beatles, at the absolute peak of their popularity, who could have easily kept all their weird, experiment shit to themselves, decided, “Nah.” Were they concerned that their muse was taking them down certain stylistic avenues to which a large segment of their audience was presumably not going to be receptive? Nah. If you’re not going to cash in on your popularity by taking risks, then what’s popularity for?

Why make the music that someone else wants you to make? I mean, hell, even your own producer doesn’t want you to make this album. But your producer isn’t you. The Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru’s father isn’t going to dig the album? Well maybe the album isn’t for him anyway. Sometimes, to quote Ricky Nelson, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”